NS3 یه نرم افزار شبیه سازکه میتونید با استفاده از اون تمامی شبیه سازی های شبکه ای برای مدیریت شبکه ، خطاها ، سرعت و امنیت رو انجام بدید .بیشترین کاربرد این نرم افزار در شبیه سازی شبکه های حسگر بیسیم است.
مهمترین عیب نرم افزار NS-3 تحت لینوکس بودن اونه. اما راه هایی وجود داره که می توان محیط لینوکس رو با استفاده از نرم افزار VMware Workstation توی ویندوز شبیه سازی کرد و NS-3 رو داخل اون نصب کرد.
A team led by Tom Henderson, George Riley, Sally Floyd, and Sumit Roy, applied for and received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to build a replacement for ns-2, called ns-3. This team collaborated with the Planete project of INRIA at Sophia Antipolis, with Mathieu Lacage as the software lead, and formed a new open source project.
In the process of developing ns-3, it was decided to completely abandon backward-compatibility with ns-2. The new simulator would be written from scratch, using the C++ programming language. Development of ns-3 began in July 2006. A framework for generating Python bindings (pybindgen) and use of the Waf build system were contributed by Gustavo Carneiro.
The first release, ns-3.1 was made in June 2008, and afterwards the project continued making quarterly software releases, and more recently has moved to three releases per year. ns-3 made its twenty first release (ns-3.21) in September 2014